Five young people wake up dead. Washed up by the tide they scramble to an abandoned beach house, soon realising that the perpetual night and blasts of pain suggest this is some version of hell. Between in-fighting and attacks by a demonic shadow creature, they recall the collapse of the nightclub that brought them here - and begin seeing hope of a second chance in the cabin's two mysterious paintings...
'The Sky Trembles and the Earth is Afraid and the Two Eyes Are Not Brothers' [the complete title of this piece] is partially inspired by Paul Bowles’ story 'A Distant Episode', and charts a mysterious transformation from observational making-of to inventive adaptation, shot against a staggering Moroccan landscape.
"Ben Rivers explores the illusion of filmmaking in Morocco... The Moroccan Sahara is littered with the legacy of films shot in its dramatic vistas: abandoned sets that reveal the artifice of filmmaking and trigger our recollection of the half-imagined spaces of familiar films from decades past." (Artangel)
Locarno Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
The documentary film explores an unknown chapter in post South African liberation. In 1993, Lady Anya Sainsbury, a former principal ballerina at Royal Ballet in London, met Nelson Mandela at a party in South Africa. They both agreed for her to set up a dance scholarship programme at the Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London, which provided 23 of South Africa’s talented young dance students between 1995 to 2003, with the opportunity to follow their dance dreams.
The film highlights the personal experiences of six of those dancers that subsequently met Mandela in London at a dinner party in Lady Sainsbury’s house in 1999, they are Mandela’s Dancers.
The film combines archival dance photographs and video footage spanning over fifteen years, with excerpts from the student performances and candid recollections. Mandela’s Dancers is not about the triumph of the human spirit or any other of the top 10 favourite dance clichés. It’s about something far rarer and of vastly greater significance – it’s about real life. It’s about how Nelson Mandela changed the face of contemporary dance!
On her way back home from school, 14-year-old Sky (Alana Boden) is followed home, the rest is a blur. Her big sister Jessy-May (Jessica Barden) a tough, isolated 16-year-old attempts to protect her family the only way she knows how.
A fortysomething ex-lead singer of a once-moderately-famous British indie band has just had his solo album rejected and parted ways with his manager.
And, to make matters worse, his wife is cheating on him. With a woman.
So he embarks upon an ill-conceived plan to teach his wife a lesson and maybe win her back.
It involves kidnaping both her and her lover and making them swallow what he claims is rat poison – as well as swallowing some himself.
He says he's brought an antidote, but only enough for two people, and he wants the group to decide who lives.
But he hasn’t really poisoned anyone. However, the antidote is poisonous. But when he tries to explain this, not everyone believes him, with tragic consequences for all.
Living far from the continent and isolated from the rest of the world, the Guanches believed they were the only survivors of a terrible natural catastrophy that had wiped out the entire humanity, until six hundred years ago when the Spanish sailors first stepped on the Canary islands. More than 2500 years separated the two cultures.
SAVAGES IN FOREIGN LANDS is a quest to the truth and identity, but also story of survival, legacy, conquest and recognition.
"The striking and brutal realities of the students struggling for food, shelter and medication. Mimi's death from TB - and her illness unnoticed at first even by her closest friends - cannot but send a chilling chord in our modern world." A Cape Town-set reworking of Puccini’s La Bohème, sung in Xhosa (with some English dialogue).
'Breathe Umphefumlo' sees director Mark Dornford-May (U-Carmen eKhayelitsha) reunited with singer Pauline Malefane and the Isango Ensemble.
Berlinale 2015, Berlinale Special - World premiere
'The First Film' is filmmaker David Nicholas Wilkinson’s 32 year quest to prove that in October 1888 Louis Le Prince produced the world's first films in Leeds, England. Once Le Prince had perfected his projection machine he arranged to demonstrate his discovery to the American public in New York and thus the world. However on 16th September 1890, just weeks before he was due to sail to New York Louis Le Prince stepped onto the Dijon to Paris train and was never seen again. As no body was ever found no one could legally fight the Le Prince claim that he invented a camera that recorded the very first moving image. As a result, several years later, Thomas Edison and the Lumiere Brothers were to claim the glory and the prize of being acknowledged as the first people to pioneer film.
Louis Le Prince was never added to history books. But for one lone voice, who worked with him, Le Prince's name and his pioneering work was forgotten.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
In the late 1970s, from a tenement flat in Edinburgh, Bob Last and Hilary Morrison operated their record label Fast Product. A predecessor to Rough Trade and Factory Records, Fast Product quickly became the hub for a group of ground-breakingly talented musicians.
The previously untold story of a post-punk/indie music scene that reverberated from Edinburgh, throughout the UK and beyond.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
Grizzled cop Frank Grieves, struggles to keep his family together against a futuristic backdrop where recreational drugs are legal. When he delves too deeply into a case involving an unidentified corpse, he finds himself stifled by powerful government organisations. Soon caught up in a dangerous conspiracy Grieves finds that drug legalisation comes at a deadly price.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
When an encounter with the swinging scene has an unexpected impact on David's impotence, Alice thinks she might have found the solution to all their problems, but the poly-amorous world is a difficult place for a love story to flourish.
Edinburgh International Film Festival 2015 - World premiere
